4 MISC. PUBLICATION 26, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
reach of the general public and makes it an article of luxury which 
only the comparatively wealthy can afford to use. In many dis- 
tricts, timber large enough to make boards is so scarce that prac- 
tically none is used except for the manufacture of coffins. (Fig. 2.) 
Since wood for building or for fuel can not be obtained, it might 
be expected that the Chinese would turn to substitutes, such as coal, 
brick, cement, and steel, for the country possesses these and other 
mineral resources in abundance. Without timber, however, it is 
impossible to utilize the substitutes. The few coal mines that are 
developed depend largely upon imported timbers for props, lagging, 
and construction material, and the railroads on which the coal 1s 
carried run on wooden ties imported from Manchuria, Japan, or 
North America. The small native iron foundries use charcoal 
brought for many miles by boats and on men’s backs. Domestic 
iron and steel, therefore, are produced only in small quantities, and 
are so costly that they can hardly compete in the seaport cities with 
the iron and steel brought from North America and Europe. 
There is no fuel with which to bake bricks; hence millions of 
families live in miserable huts of sun-dried or partly baked mud, 
with mud floors and roofs thatched with grass or straw and mud. 
The mud absorbs vast quantities of water during wet weather, so 
that sanitary conditions are exceedingly bad. The winters are long 
and cold, and the need for fuel correspondingly great, but the supply 
is utterly inadequate, and acute suffering is widespread. Men, 
women, and children spend months in the fall patiently gathering 
straw, shrubs, leaves, and even grass roots from the mountain sides 
for the winter’s fuel. These materials seldom suffice, and in some 
regions the dung of domestic animals is dried and burned. Both 
practices affect agriculture seriously, for the one removes the vegeta- 
tion which helps to bind the soil on the hillsides and the other 
deprives the land, already overtaxed by centuries of cultivation, of 
its only available source of fertilizer. 
Without wood, without adequate transportation, without coal or 
other fuel, and with the necessity of importing at high cost not only 
machinery but also much raw material for industrial plants, many 
of the people of certain districts in China must lead a more or less 
hand-to-mouth existence. Depending as they do almost wholly on 
manual labor for producing goods as well as for transporting them, 
they have never been able to produce the surplus capital upon which 
higher standards of living must be based. 
It is inconceivable that the United States can ever suffer so acutely 
from timber shortage. It is well to reflect, however, that as wood 
and its substitutes become more difficult to get, an increasing propor- 
tion of our national energy must be expended in satisfying our re- 
quirements for these materials. The production of other things must 
be correspondingly less, and the ultimate result will be a decrease in 
our total national wealth. Itis just as true in this country as in China 
that decreasing production of goods and decreasing national wealth, 
in the face of an increasing population, must inevitably result in lower 
standards of living and general economie and social decadence. 
